An automatic vending machine, which is common equipment of commercial automation, is free from the limit of times and places, could save manpower and facilitate the transaction, is a brand-new commercial retail form, and is also called as a 24-hour miniature supermarket.
Currently, according to the difference of aisles, traditional automatic vending machines are mainly classified into: a spring spiral aisle vending machine, a crawler aisle vending machine, a grid cabinet vending machine, an S-shaped stacking aisle vending machine, etc. Each vending machine has different application scopes due to the limit of characteristics thereof. Therefore, according to the sold goods, the vending machines could be classified into: an automatic drink vending machine, an automatic food vending machine, an automatic audit product machine, and a comprehensive automatic vending machine.
The above-mentioned vending machines have main disadvantages that: the spring spiral aisle vending machine easily gets stuck when selling bottled drink, and has relatively high requirements for placing; the crawler aisle vending machine could not sell commodities which do not stand stably (as long as one commodity falls down, it would fall down the whole aisle like domino); the multi-gate grid cabinet vending machine can accommodate fewer commodities, and thus, has low space utilization rate; and the S-shaped stacking aisle vending machine has complicated structure, high design and processing difficulties and high requirements, and general enterprises have no ability to produce such vending machine, and moreover, commodities sold by such vending machine are limited. The above-mentioned vending machines require workers to place the goods in the corresponding aisles one by one carefully, thereby wasting time and energy; and moreover, each aisle has relative small adaptability to sold commodities, and all vending machines except the multi-gate grid cabinet vending machine require that the goods have considerable breaking resistance.